To many people outside Myanmar (Burma), it might come as a surprise
that there is such a thing as Language-oriented Poetry in contemporary
Myanmar poetry scene. As I happen to be the person responsible (‘the
instigator’ / ‘the culprit’) of so-called Language-oriented Poetry in
Myanmar, I feel that I should have my say on how this has come about in
Myanmar, a country that has been under a military regime for the past 20
years or so.
To give the reader a background of contemporary (a loaded term here in
Myanmar, too) Myanmar poetry, I would have to take the reader back to
the thirties when the first Experimental Poetry Movement started in
Yangon, specifically by some literature students of Yangon University.
They started to write a new kind of poetry that had never existed before
in form or content. Their poetry broke away from the
traditional/classical style of writing about the old Burmese monarchy
and the old Burmese way of life before the British annexation of Burma
in 1886. No doubt, there was a much venerated elderly poet, Thakhin Ko
Daw Hmaing, who wrote poems that stirred the latent patriotism of the
people, but he was writing in the traditional way. The ‘Khit San’ or the
‘Experimental’ Poets invented a new poetic form by writing in lines and
stanzas for the first time in the history of Myanmar Poetry. This new
form was based on a rigid rhyme scheme, called ‘4-3-2 rhyme’, i.e.,
there were 4 syllables per line with the last or 4th syllable of the 1st
line rhyming with the 3rd syllable of the 2nd line and the 2nd syllable
of the 3rd line, and starting again with another 4-3-2 rhyming lines,
more often than not, ending with a line of 7 syllables. The contents
dealt with mundane, daily life topics, but with a strong flavour of
Myanmar cultural icons. Min Thu Wun and Zaw Gyi were the two leading
Experimental poets who influenced Myanmar poetry for the next 30 years
or so.
If Experimental Poetry was the 1st poetry movement of the 20th
century, the 2nd was the New Writing Movement, started and led by Dagon
Tayar (who is in his 90s now and blind), after the end of the 2nd World
War. Influenced by the leftist ideology of the historical period, he
introduced People’s Poetry, a Marxist-oriented realism, during the late
40s. There was at that time an ideological struggle between the
so-called ‘art for art’s sake’ bourgeois poetry and ‘art for people’s
sake’ leftist poetry. Those who did not support New Writing were branded
‘bourgeois’ and severely attacked by the ‘progressives’. Although New
Writing carried on Experimental Poetry’s 4-3-2 rhyme scheme with some
changes in the number of syllables per line making the rhyme scheme more
flexible, its aim, intention, and content were revolutionary. Art was
for the masses, and poetry was the weapon of the masses against the
national landowners and capitalists. It was unfortunate that New
Writing, while winning over the hearts and minds of a whole generation
of younger poets, sometimes became mere propaganda, as the dictum was
that poetry must be less aesthetic and more utilitarian so that even the
common person of low education would ‘appreciate’ the poem with ease.
Compared to New Writing poems, Experimental poetry became pale and
anaemic, bereft of ‘reality’, of the daily ‘heroic’ struggles of the
masses for a socialist democratic state.
Then came Modern Poetry, the third wave of 20th century Myanmar
poetry, around 1968. A noted writer-translator of Western poetry, Maung
Tha Noe wrote in his preface to a collection of translations of Western
poetry (mostly Romantic but also including some modernist poets, such as
Eliot) that “there was no modern poetry at all for one so dizzy and
sick to inhale.” His was a call for Modern Poetry in Myanmar, and he was
supported by Mya Zin , a Harvard scholar, and Nyunt Kyuu, a well-known
poet. The trio then came to be notoriously called the ‘Zin-Noe-Kyuu’
gang, notorious because ‘modern’ in poetry implied Western, bourgeois
poetry. Mya Zin introduced the term ‘modern sensibility’ to Myanmar
poetry, but without the modernist sense of Western poetry. The idea it
espoused was more ‘contemporaneous’, i.e, ‘of the times’, than Modernist
a la Modernism. The trio, sensing the danger of poetry degenerating
into propagandistic verse, called for a revival of poetry more
skillfully crafted, rather than New Writing poetry that emphasized
ideological edge over ‘artistic/poetic’ techniques. This started a
poetry war between the ‘decadent, bourgeois, Western-longing’ moderns
with ‘revolutionary’,’progressive’, ‘people’s’ poets, but with the
intervention of the highly-respected New Writing leader Dagon Tayar, a
compromise was made with the result that a new kind of poetry was born,
the ‘modern’ or (in Myanmar) the ‘Khit Por’ poetry. Even to this day,
some scholar poets lament that the road to (Myanmar) modernism was lost
to ‘Khit Por’ poetry, which carried on New Writing’s leftist orientation
in content but written in free verse, another revolutionary aspect of
form in the history of Myanmar poetry. However, till today, many old
guard poets consider free verse as ‘chopped up prose rather than
poetry’.
The end of the Soviet empire and the coming down of the Berlin Wall
had direct repercussions on remnants of New Writing poets. With the
demise of Communism, their ideological basis for poetry was gone, but
soon it was replaced by ‘individualism’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘democracy’.
Some New Writing poets joined the ranks of Khit Por, which was basically
Lyric poetry, not unlike the ‘official verse’/ ‘Workshop’ poetry kind
attacked by the LANGUAGE Poets in the US. It had/has a confessional tone
expressing the self’s agony in the face of the unfair powers that be
controlling and manipulating the lives of the people. The people’s poet
now/then became an individual suffering the atrocities of society and
this self-expression was supposed to reflect the people’s suffering.
Indeed, the poet’s individual suffering ‘represented’ that of the
masses. During the 90s, there was a surge of Khit Por poetry and poets
to the point that it became mainstream poetry. For every ten poems
published in magazines at least eight were Khit Por with the remaining
two of ‘old’ experimental type or a much watered down version of ‘a
reflection of people’s lives’ type. Khit Por poetry was the modern, the
new, the up-to-the-moment contemporary poetry based on the poet’s
ego-psychology or his/her ‘true, honest, original, and authentic’
emotions. Poetry soon became the art of expressing the poet’s emotions.
This was the situation in Myanmar poetry till the beginning of the
21st century when cracks began to show through. One was the result of an
interest in Postmodernism, which was and is still being ‘imported’
(i.e., ‘yet another move to bring in Western decadent ideas into
pristine traditional Myanmar culture, especially the culture of the mind
and the intellect, with the aim of poisoning the pure minds of the
youth’) by a noted scholar, Zaw Zaw Aung. Although he had been
explaining the many and complex theories of
Postmodernism/Post-structuralism to the local reading public, Postmodern
Poetry was still something vague hovering over the horizon. Young and
budding poets who could not find an identity or a platform for their
voice started looking for something new, anything non-Khit Por. They
wanted to know about and to write ‘Postmodern Poetry’ without actually
having any idea of what it was. Another crack was seen in Khit Por
itself. Though it had achieved the prestigious status of being
mainstream, the focus on the poet’s emotion started to take its toll to
the point that poets were reproducing the same emotions in the same ways
so much so that an editor of a magazine wrote that poems were becoming
almost identical. Except for the different pen names of the different
poets, the poems had the same tone, color, content, and expression. In
other words, Khit Por had come to a stand still instead of evolving or
‘progressing’. Myanmar poetry had reached an impasse!
This was where I came in. I, too, had been writing Khit Por poems but
had become disillusioned with what I was doing, which was what everyone
who called him/herself a Khit Por poet was doing, churning out the same
emotions of personal pain and suffering in startling images. It soon
reached the point when the whole idea of writing a poem rested on the
discovery of a suitable image on which to hang the poem. As an attempt
to find something ‘new’, I first translated some Post-Soviet Russian
poetry and later introduced John Ashbery and the New York school poets. I
received some flak from old school poets for ‘importing’ decadent
American poets. Then around 2004 when I started writing articles on
LANGUAGE Poetry/Writing in the US, followed by publishing a book of my
own poems titled ‘Distinguishing Features’, I came to be labeled as
‘LP’, Language poet, and a group of poets who were close to me and who
also started ‘experimenting’ with LANGUAGE Writing were promptly labeled
LP gang with me as the gang leader. For the next few years, there were
heated debates in magazines between myself and (it seemed) the whole of
Khit Por poetry. It was a battle between KP (Khit Por) and LP (Language
Poetry). I defended the poetics of LANGUAGE Writing and our group’s
attempts to invent that kind of poetry in Myanmar. Zaw Zaw Aung
supported me all the way, explaining to readers that this was what they
had been wanting, Postmodern poetry, but what they said was interesting
in a way : ‘We want Postmodern poetry but not Language poetry.’
The heat has somewhat died down with my loudest critics reluctantly
accepting our (Myanmar) brand of Language (-oriented) poetry since
younger poets are copying this kind of writing en masse and magazines
are publishing them. Some editors are even saying that LP is showing
signs of becoming ‘mainstream’. God forbid! Have these younger writers
pretended to overlook Bernadette Mayer’s last point to ‘work your ass
off and don’t ever get famous’, which I translated in 2004? Now, this
(Myanmar version) of Language-oriented poetry has also appeared online,
with the example of Pem skool, a group of Myanmar online poets who are
also fiercely into Flarf (again introduced by me).
Provided I get some space, I would like to go into more detail
concerning this phenomenon of Myanmar version of Language-oriented
Poetry sometime in the near future, hopefully with some translations.

Notes: This article first appeared on Jacket Magazine on April 27, 2011. Please visit Jacket for more info.

and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm's text.
The child's eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.
The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.
The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.
A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.